Agave farmers protest alleged dirty deals, abusive tactics, and serious corruption in the tequila industry. Felisa Rogers investigates.
On a cloudy morning last week, hundreds of agave farmers gathered in the historic central square of Tequila, Jalisco, where Julián Rodríguez Parra, president of the Mexican Agave Council, addressed the crowd.
“A year ago we went to the federal government to ask for help and they told us they’d put a stop to this bullshit,” he said. “But they didn’t do anything. And now here we are trying to put food on the table.”
The agaveros raised their fists and chanted, “Fair prices!”
Parra continued, “While foreigners pay 250 dollars for a bottle of tequila, here we are paid one peso for a kilo of agave. This is injustice.”
Two teenage girls and an older mustachioed gentleman held up a banner reading “NO MORE ADULTERATED TEQUILA! TEQUILA MUST BE 100% AGAVE! NO MORE LARGE ESTATES OR MONOPOLIES! WE WANT A JUST PRICE, THE NATIONAL WEALTH MUST BE SHARED EQUITABLY!”
The peaceful protest had begun three hours earlier, when agaveros (agave farmers) from several states convened by bus, truck, and motorcycle for an orderly march through the cobblestone streets of Tequila. Though the protest was peaceful, the rhetoric was not.
“We are here to ensure that they’re not going to keep mixing cane alcohol and other substances that aren’t agave!” shouted organizer Salvador Ibarra Landeros from the back of a pick-up. “We demand that the distilleries produce tequila that’s 100% agave! If they don’t listen to our demands, they’ll find themselves expropriated.”
Given the tequila industry’s history of violence, it takes remarkable courage to go on the record and make accusations against powerful organizations.
The farmers’ ire is directed at the biggest tequila companies, international corporations, empty promises from the federal government, and the Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT).
The CRT is not a government agency, but rather a nonprofit organization in charge of enforcing the rules that govern the tequila industry. It is officially an “interprofessional organization” that represents all parties associated with tequila production. However, its membership list skews heavily toward tequileros (tequila producers). The protesting agaveros contend they don’t have a voice in the organization that is supposed to protect their interests. They charge that the CRT is corrupt, in league with “big tequila,” and tacitly supporting monopolistic practices that squeeze out small farmers.
The hacienda model
Protesting agaveros allege that Jose Cuervo and other big tequila companies have implemented strategies to intentionally drive down prices — refusing to deal directly with farmers (instead relying on rapacious middlemen, or coyotes) and planting more agave on their own estates while making false promises to encourage the smallholders to continue farming agave.
“With the mechanics of the low price of agave, their idea is to ruin us economically so we go bankrupt and are forced to sell our land to the large companies,” said Julián Rodríguez Parra at an earlier protest outside CRT headquarters in October of 2024.
While this sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories, there may be something to it. In 1910, the tequila industry was disrupted by the Mexican Revolution. The rebel rallying cry was “Tierra y Libertad” or “Land and Freedom.” After the dust settled about 25 years later, President Lázaro Cárdenas began making good on the promise of the revolution. His administration broke large holdings into parcels and redistributed the land to peasant farmers. In Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and The Politics of Production, Sarah Bowen notes that tequileros who lost their massive landholdings were forced to rely on smallholders for their agave. But these days, big players in the industry seem to be trying to move back in time to something like the hacienda model.
Remberto Galván Cabrera, the official spokesperson for the Mexican Agave Council (Consejo Mexicano del Agave or CMXDA), an organization that advocates for the rights of agaveros and transparency in the tequila industry, says that while 16 major producers now dominate the market, 42,000 families rely on agave for income.
“If we unite, we’re the great majority. Divided, we become a minority,” he says. “We intend to lift ourselves up. We have decided to continue working and fighting for what is ours.”
Is your 100 % agave tequila really 100% agave?
For consumers, one of the agaveros’ more alarming charges is that CRT officials have been turning a profit by allowing some tequila corporations to mix cane or corn alcohol into tequila that’s then labeled as 100 percent agave. This belief is widespread. Remberto Galván says they’ve sent samples of tequila for laboratory analysis, have seen trucks delivering cane alcohol to distilleries, and have gathered enough proof to merit a government investigation.
Galván says the agaveros are fighting for more than just their own rights.
“This is a battle for everyone, because the consumer is being poisoned drop by drop by tequila that’s labeled 100 percent agave but it’s not,” Galván says. “We want tequila made with agave…The tequila industry has been deceiving us.”
The word poison may be a bit strong — technically cane alcohol is no more poisonous than tequila. But, like many people who work with agave, Galván believes the plant is medicinal and that 100% agave tequila is actually good for you. “Around the world agave is considered a plant of the gods…a plant that’s curative, that brings happiness, that has real value,” he says.
Galván was born into a rural family and started working in the agave fields at age 12. When he was a teenage crew leader for Jose Cuervo, he fought to get benefits for the jornaleros (field workers). He’s been fighting for the rights of jornaleros and agaveros ever since.
A reverence for agave is woven into the roots of Mexican culture, and the story of tequila hinges on the peculiar nature of its raw material. One of CMXDA’s missions is to “promote practices that honor the indigenous roots and traditional methods of tequila production.” A traditional blanco tequila doesn’t rely on aging or infusions for its alluring and distinctive flavors, which are derived solely from agave, the water source, and the craft of fermentation and distillation. But blue agave takes a long time to mature — five to 10 years — and that creates ongoing tension in the industry, as well as the temptation to cut corners.
“Efficiency” may mean buying immature plants and using diffusers to maximize the quantity of tequila that can be made from each agave. The resulting product requires additives such as caramel and syrup to make it taste something like tequila. But that’s just business as usual these days, and totally legal.
The agaveros are making a very serious accusation when they suggest that the CRT is allowing tequileros to cut costs by mixing cane alcohol into tequila and labeling it as 100% agave. Although so-called mixto tequila can legally contain 49 percent sugar from other sources, this sugar must be added during the fermentation process. “Cold blending” tequila with other alcohols is illegal. (The CRT did not respond to a request for comment.)
For nearly 30 years, the tequila industry has enjoyed a reputation for producing one of the most closely regulated spirits on the planet. In 1994, the CRT was founded to enforce consistency in an industry that had developed a reputation for rotgut.
The agency set to its job with a vengeance. The CRT hired customs certifiers to bust exporters of fake tequila at the US border. In Mexico, CRT officials implemented a stringent system of quality control that included requiring licensed farmers to document every single agave planted (including GPS coordinates) and apply for a verified “passport” to transport agave. They assigned an inspector to every distillery, and mandated that every batch of tequila be tested in a lab to ensure that it meets quality standards.
As Sarah Bowen wrote in Divided Spirits, “The combination of increased quality control by the CRT and its strategic partnerships with government agencies contributed to improvements in tequila’s reputation and a decline in the production of uncertified tequila.” Tequila began its meteoric ascent in popularity and status. By the late 90s, 100% agave “sipping tequila” was changing how people thought of the category and a legion of obsessive aficionados emerged.
Why the “mixto” category exists
The irony is that most tequila is adulterated — legally. Adulteration is built into tequila’s regulatory structure, and the history of that structure registers as a series of concessions to profit. In 1949, Mexico formally defined tequila: a liquor made from mature 100% agave grown in the state of Jalisco. But this didn’t last long.
During an agave shortage in 1964, tequila companies pressured the government into reducing the minimum required agave sugar to 70 percent and removing the stipulation that agave must be mature. In 1968, the rules changed again, allowing agave to be cultivated outside of Jalisco and making it legal to add flavoring and coloring to tequila. These additives could approximate an agave flavor, paving the way to 1970, when another agave shortage precipitated a further drop in the required quantity of agave sugars, this time to 51 percent. This was profitable for the tequileros but bad for the agaveros.
Agave: The boom and bust cycle
In addition to shaping the legal definition of tequila, agave shortages create tension in the industry. Blue agave is subject to extremely dramatic price fluctuations, and farmers are locked in a boom-and-bust cycle.
Clayton Szczech, author of A Field Guide to Tequila, explains that agave’s long growing cycle contributes to the volatile market. As demand for tequila increases, agave prices climb. Farmers notice the increase and plant more agave. Then more farmers get in on the action. “Five or six years later, the first crops come to market and agave prices swiftly drop due to the increase in supply,” he says.
In his book, Szczech provides an example: In 2006, the price of agave was down to as low as 50 Mexican cents a kilo, but by 2018 it was back to 32 pesos a kilo, an increase of more than 6000 percent.
The price has again dropped to as low as one or two pesos a kilo, and the peso is weaker than it has been in years. Farmers, many of whom leased land and borrowed money to grow their agave, are now selling at a loss.
“Agaveros are often struggling to begin with, and they may become destitute after losing money on an agave crop,” Szczech says. He notes that the CRT monitors agave supply, but that since Mexico’s turn away from the agrarian reform of the post-revolutionary era, the country offers neither subsidies nor incentives to plant when demand is low.
“Since the revolution,” he explains,“there has been a widespread expectation of state support for the countryside that only started to be unraveled or betrayed in the 1980s with Mexico’s neoliberal turn, which was consummated with NAFTA in 1994. That’s why so many agaveros are like, What the fuck? Where’s the government’s support? We’re farmers. This is Mexico. The state is supposed to help us because we’re an agricultural country, and we had a revolution about this.”
Farmers have long borne the brunt of the volatile agave cycle, but it affects tequileros as well, and agave shortages are a primary reason we have mixtos, tequila made with immature agave, diffusers, additives, and the current scandal.
Agave ‘passports’ and the additive-free movement
In December of 2024, a coalition of agavero leaders and local deputies issued a formal request that the secretary of the economy investigate corruption in the CRT and the alleged collusion between general director Ramón González Figueroa and Juan Domingo Beckmann, CEO of Jose Cuervo. The request was accompanied by a searing eight-page indictment of the CRT, which outlines the charges of corruption and asks the government to test the allegedly adulterated tequila and take punitive actions against corrupt tequileros — and the CRT.
Remberto Galván makes it very clear that the governor and other state officials have been cooperating with the agaveros to resolve the situation.
“It’s important to mention that the government of Jalisco has never turned a blind eye to the problem, but that the tequila monopoly is much bigger than all of us together.”
The agaveros have support from at least one federal politician. Echoing a recent court ruling, Green Party Senator Waldo Fernández González has called for “an exhaustive investigation to uncover whether the CRT is engaging in abusive practices toward the agaveros.” The senator suggested an end to the CRT’s monopoly on certification. To support his request, he referenced monopolistic behavior and the sale of black market permits to mask production of adulterated tequila.
So what does this actually mean? Allegedly, someone approaches an agave farmer with empty fields and offers to buy the “agaves” on their land. Using a CRT-issued permit, they pay the farmers for agave that was never there in order to cover for tequila companies that are selling illegally adulterated tequila.
So far, the allegations of illegal adulteration have not been publicly confirmed. The obvious organization to take on this project would be the CRT, which has made no move in this direction. This should come as no suprise to anyone who has been following the saga of the Additive Free Alliance (AFA). The battle over additive-free tequila was a warning sign that something rotten might be afoot with the CRT.
Last March, federal authorities raided the home and office of Grover and Scarlet Sanschagrin. The raid was the result of a CRT tip that the Sanschagrins were selling “fake tequila,” and “adulterating tequila.”
This accusation was ironic to anyone familiar with the Sanschagrins’ work. The creators of Tequila Matchmaker are long-time advocates for transparency in the tequila industry. In 2020, they founded a program that allowed tequila companies to opt in to labeling their bottles as additive-free. The voluntary program raised hackles in the CRT. Drama ensued and the Sanschagrins eventually volunteered to relinquish the additive-free program so the CRT could take over the process.
The CRT certified Patrón as additive free but then shelved its program, allegedly due to push back from other large tequila companies. The CRT then issued a new rule: brands could no longer use “additive-free” on their labels. But the CRT wasn’t done with the Sanschagrins. After the raid and subsequent criminal charges, the couple were forced to flee Mexico, where they had lived since 2015.
When asked to comment for this article, the Sanschagrins replied, “The shocking overreach of raiding our home and falsely accusing us of criminal activities simply because we were educating consumers about the legal use of additives makes us wonder: what was this really about?”
After the CRT shut them down in Mexico, the alliance relaunched and expanded as a US nonprofit that offers additive-free certification for agave-based products, including raicilla, mezcal, and agave syrups. The AFA relies on labs to verify that products are additive free. Testing can also potentially confirm if tequila has been adulterated with cane alcohol.
“The Additive Free Alliance is receiving repeated requests for this type of service from consumers as well as small brands within Mexico,” Grover Sanschagrin says. It remains to be seen if anything will come of this.
What’s next for the agaveros?
The protesting agaveros are calling for the abolition of the mixto category, coyotes, and the CRT. They’ve petitioned the governor’s office, outlining the case to fix a minimum and maximum price for agave, which would likely do something to alleviate the animosity between agaveros and tequileros.
“I think we have the moment in our hands today,” Remberto Galván says. “And we have the power to reclaim what is ours, and to tell the world what has been happening and what we can do to stop it.”
At the end of our interview, he raises a glass and says, “Thanks to this beverage, and to the agave we grow that makes it quality, so you feel good when you drink it. To a tequila that makes us great and gives us a global identity. Let’s keep working for that, right?”
This is a developing story. Stay posted for continuing coverage.
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